The Qualities of Leadership:Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation

Torun Dewan and David Myatt

STICERD - Political Economy and Public Policy Paper Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE

Abstract: Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a commonparty line. An activist's understanding of his environment is based on the speeches ofparty leaders. A leader's influence, measured by the weight placed on her speech,increases with her judgement on policy (sense of direction) and her ability to conveyideas (clarity of communication). A leader with perfect clarity of communication enjoysgreater influence than one with a perfect sense of direction. Activists can choose howmuch attention to pay to leaders. A necessary condition for a leader to monopolize theagenda is that she is the most coherent communicator. Sometimes leaders attract moreattention by obfuscating their messages. A concern for party unity mitigates thisincentive; when activists emphasize following the party line, they learn more about theirenvironment.

Date: 2007-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/pepp/pepp24.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation (2008)
Working Paper: The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:stipep:24

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in STICERD - Political Economy and Public Policy Paper Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().